


The Kitchen Is The Heart Of The Home

by ProblemWithTrouble



Series: Pacific Rim [10]
Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: First Kiss, Jake is just so in love, M/M, Pining, Pre and Post Canon, There's a touch of angst, i love him so much, just a smig
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 09:36:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19060009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProblemWithTrouble/pseuds/ProblemWithTrouble
Summary: Jake is sixteen when his whole life gets fucked up. He’s three months from graduating from the Academy. He’s going to be a Ranger and he’s just drifted with Nate for the first time. They're sitting on the counter because it makes them feel tall and like adults and Jake is eating ice cream and Nate is sipping beer he doesn’t like, and Jake leans forward to kiss him.





	1. Sixteen

Jake is sixteen when his whole life gets fucked up. He’s three months from graduating from the Academy. He’s going to be a Ranger and he’s just drifted with Nate for the first time. Really drifted, in something with the same strain as a real jaeger. No more training camp for them. But then he fucks it up. He doesn’t mean to. He just can’t help it. 

He and Nate are alone in the kitchen, the same way they are every night they sneak out of their rooms. Nate pretends to like the taste of the beer he sips as Jake eats his ice cream. When they first started sneaking in, he’d drink a beer too, but he really didn’t like it and he wasn’t willing to pretend just to look cool and adult. 

They’re sitting on the counter, because neither of them have hit their growth spurt and they still feel a little short. Especially when they had seen Stacker that day, Jake hopes he’ll hit that growth spurt hard and be taller than his dad. From the look on Mako’s face every time he says that she doesn’t think it’s likely. She’s probably right. The lack of nutrition in the world with the rationing and the shortages makes it pretty unlikely, but he hopes. 

Anyway, they’re sitting on the counter because it makes them feel tall and like adults and Jake is eating ice cream and Nate is sipping beer he doesn’t like, and Jake leans forward to kiss him. It only lasts a second before something sparks in the ghost drift, something that he doesn’t understand and then Nate is pulling away. 

“I can’t.” 

“Sure, you can. It’s 2024, no one cares if we make out in the kitchen.” That’s his first mistake, he never sounds serious. He’s almost always serious and Nate knows that, but when emotions are running high Nate sometimes misses the cues that tell him things are real. He misses it this time. His second mistake is leaning back in to keep kissing before he’s made sure that Nate understands.

“I mean it.” He looks sad when he pushes on Jake’s chest and slips off the counter. Jake doesn’t know what he has to be sad about. He’s not the one who just made an idiot of himself trying to make out with his best friend. 

“Why not? I felt it in the drift. You want this.” Mistake number three. Never tell Nate what he wants, and never bring up what’s in the drift if Nate doesn’t first. Jake used to think it was because he didn’t want to acknowledge that Jake had been in his head and they were as close as anyone could be, but now he knows better. He doesn’t want anyone else to hear about their drift because, to Nate, it’s special. 

Nate drains his beer and puts it in the garbage while shaking his head. Jake doesn’t get off the counter. “I get it. You’re just here to play and have fun and all this just slides right off your back, but just play with someone else, because for me, this is real.” 

Mistake four. If he had listened. If he hadn’t been sixteen and always ready for a fight and tried listening more then he might have understood that this wasn’t about piloting. This wasn’t about Jaegers. This was about Nate being too far gone and Jake not being ready for that. But he won’t learn how to use his smooth-talking skills for another year, and he won’t remember to listen before he starts talking for another two after that. At sixteen, he doesn’t understand how young he is. 

“After all of this you still think I’m not all the way in on this? That being a pilot is still all it was at the beginning?” Jake slips off the counter after that because now he has to be ready to fight. They haven’t truly tried to hurt each other in almost a year, intertwined all the way through, but now Jake thinks he might need to. All his defenses are up. 

Now Nate’s yelling because he can’t back down from a fight any more than Jake can. “Are you seriously going to stand there and pretend you don’t think this is a game?”

Of course, it’s not a game. “What the fuck do you know?”

“That you’ve never taken anything seriously in your life and I’m done being on that list.” Nate walks out, leaving Jake seething because no he’s got all this anger and hurt pent up in him with nowhere to go. 

That’s when he gets in the jaeger. Twelve hours after that is when he gets kicked out of the program. Three months later he gets into a screaming match with his dad on the phone because he was supposed to be in England but turns out Jake was in LA when a kaiju hit it. Three hours after that Mako calls and tries to smooth it all over, tries to explain that it’s just because dad is worried, and he sent him packing out of the program to keep him safe after the strain almost killed him. Like the strain that was killing dad, but Jake can’t hear her over the blood pounding in his ears because he hasn’t forgiven his dad for kicking him out. He won’t for another six years. It takes more time to forgive his dad for dying, when it could have been anyone to drift with Chuck. 

When he steps back into the Jaeger with Nate, he realizes that he still hasn’t forgiven Nate for their fight because if he had stayed maybe they would have piloted Striker. Maybe they’d be dead but at least his dad would be alive. At least the actual leader, the real hero, would be alive.


	2. I'm Great

Nate’s being released and Jake doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s busy, suddenly put in charge of leading an army, but he wants to see Nate. Not that he hasn’t visited Med Bay, but he wants to see him now that he’s up walking around and looking like a whole person who won’t shatter if Jake touches him. But he can never be sure of his welcome with Nate. 

Instead, he decides to go to the kitchen at five ‘til midnight that night and see if Nate comes. Their ghost drift has gotten weaker with the week that’s passed but this is what he would have done before. They could never corner each other, that would only lead to trouble, they always had to go to neutral ground if they wanted to talk and have the other listen. 

“I told you,” Nate said when Jake’s back was still turned to the door and he was digging in the fridge. 

“Told me what?” He holds a beer above his head the way he did little over a week ago, but things are different now. “Want a drink?”

“Sure.”

Jake turns around and sets the beer on the counter and goes back to the freezer for ice cream. 

“That you could have been great. Thanks for proving me right.” The cap pops off behind Jake and he can’t help the smile that’s on his face.

He turns back around and start to make his one spoon at a time sundae, but this time Nate doesn’t say anything about the amount of toppings. Instead Nate grabs his own spoon and takes a bite of the ice cream, no toppings though. 

“That beer tastes like shit with ice cream,” Jake says because they’re close, Nate’s leaning across the counter so he can get at the ice cream and he has to fill the silence somehow. Drift or no drift things aren’t what they used to be. Nate’s not who he used to be. Neither is Jake. 

“It’s not great to start with.” He takes a drink of the beer and Jake’s back to when he was sixteen and he leaned over and changed everything. He still wants that. He’s fucked a lot of blonde-haired American dudes with strong jaws in the last few years, but they never scratched that itch. There was always something missing. Maybe it was the taste of shitty beer and vanilla ice cream. 

“For once, you’re right. I was great. I saved the world,” Jake says, and he can’t help it. 

“I remember there being a few other people there, but sure.” Nate smiles at him and Jake still can’t shake the urge to ruin it all again. 

“Yeah. I’ll have to promote Gottlieb.” 

Nate rolls his eyes hard and takes a long drink of his beer without breaking Jake’s stare. “I wasn’t talking about piloting.”

“What?” He could usually get Nate’s non sequitur, especially after how much they had drifted in the past few weeks but that was too much for even him. 

Nate shakes his head like he was just realizing that he’d said it out loud. “It doesn’t matter.” 

Jake gives him a look that he hoped conveyed how hard he was calling bullshit on that one, a look that Nate should have known well. “Come on. We’ve been in each other’s heads and I didn’t even get that.” 

Nate shakes his head as he looks away, obviously mulling something over in his weird head before straightening and tossing the spoon in the sink. “I shouldn’t be drinking with these meds. I’m going to bed.” 

“How I could have been great? You didn’t mean I could be great at piloting? I am just great in general.” 

Nate doesn’t turn around, but he does stop. “I thought for a long time about what I’d say to you if you ever came back. Or we ran into each other on the street and that was it. That I wasn’t talking about the piloting.”

Jake rakes through his memory and he knows that Nate’s talking about the night he tried to pilot the Mark-IV by himself, but he can’t remember it too well. When he had told Amara that he didn’t remember what he’d fought with Nate about he hadn’t been completely lying. The strain had done more damage than he had been willing to admit, and he’d run over all the ways that the conversation could have gone differently so many times that it was hard to remember what had been said for real. All he remembers is being rejected and then the hurt and pain of the person that he was starting to think he loved didn’t love him back. Didn’t even like him. “The brain trauma that followed that night kinda wiped my memory on that one so I’m gonna need some help.”

Nate’s head drops as he looks to his feet and then he does turn around. “When I said you were playing. I wasn’t talking about piloting. You and I weren’t in it for the same reason, but we were both in it and we were going to save the world. I was talking about the kiss.” Nate’s walking towards him like they’re fighting and maybe they are, and Jake just hasn’t caught on yet. 

“That’s why I’m still pissed you didn’t come back. No matter how many times Mako called you, or I called you, or Herc called you. You just didn’t want to come back if you couldn’t have a play thing.” They’re only a few inches apart and Nate’s voice is quiet and frustrated and Jake’s more confused than he remembers being in a while. Maybe more confused than when he broke into the Jaeger and Amara had already stolen his tech. 

“You and I obviously have different memories of the Academy because I have no idea what you’re talking about.” 

Nate scoffs. “Me. I was talking about me. You almost got yourself killed because you can’t fucking listen and accept that I didn’t want to be…just there. I couldn’t be convenient.” 

Jake’s stunned into silence but not away from action, so he leans forward and presses his lips to Nate’s because that’d fix this right? If Nate knew that he’d never been convenient in his life then things would be fixed. 

Nate pushes at him so hard that Jake’s back hits the refrigerator doors. For a long moment his mouth is open and he’s breathing hard like he’s getting ready to yell but he just turns around and start to walk away. 

“Just because I know how to enjoy life doesn’t mean I’m always playing around,” Jake shouts after him. It sounded a lot smoother in his head. He’s a motivational speech guy, not an emotions guy. Maybe he had more in common with his dad than he thought. 

“Sure, Jake.”

The door swings shut and Jake’s alone in the kitchen with ice cream melting and two lukewarm beers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [my tumblr](https://problemwithtrouble.tumblr.com)


	3. Soup

Jake’s able to avoid Nate for three days. Or maybe Nate manages to avoid Jake. He’s not sure. There haven’t been any moments where they were in the same hall and turned around or brushed past each other. They just never saw each other. But then it’s midnight and Jake is legitimately hungry because he skipped dinner in the mess to avoid Nate and he hadn’t been able to get into the city for dinner the way he’d planned. 

He walks in as Nate is halfway through a bowl of soup. So, they were avoiding each other. Well Jake can’t leave now. “There anymore of that left?” 

Nate nods and just scoots a little further down the counter. When Jake has his food in the microwave he speaks. “You’re a pain in the ass.” 

“’Kay?”

“Always were. You couldn’t be convenient if you tried. I kissed you because I wanted to. Both times. And I get it. I’ve been gone a long time, and you apparently took it personally when my dad kicked me out of the academy which is absurd.”

Nate laughs and Jake wants to laugh with him, but he’s got what he wants to say figured out and Nate’s pretty laugh isn’t going to distract him now. 

“And you still have a huge stick up your ass, but I still want you. And if you don’t want me in the sexy and romantic sense, then that’s fine. We can be drift partners and run the PPDC and be best friends.” The microwave beeps and Jake focuses on his soup while Nate stays strangely silent. 

“I can’t do casual,” Nate blurts out when Jake is almost done with his soup. 

Jake shrugs. “I don’t want casual. Not with you.” He looks at Nate who’s nodding his head silently. He can’t tell if he’s anywhere closer to a decision, but Jake still has soup, so he’ll let him be for now. 

When Jake does finish his soup it’s time for someone to make a decision and since he’s already laid his card down, he figures he doesn’t have much more to lose. “So, are you going back to my room or yours?” 

Nate looks up at him with a smile even though the look in his eyes is still a little panicked. He grabs both their bowls and sets them in the sink to give himself something to do. “Yours.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [my tumblr](https://problemwithtrouble.tumblr.com)
> 
> I hope you enjoyed!

**Author's Note:**

> Y'all I love Lamcost and I don't care if I am the only one. It takes me 7 years to fill a prompt but I am always taking Lamcost prompts/suggestion/songs/one word prompts. You can leave them here or send them to me on tumblr.
> 
> [my tumblr](https://problemwithtrouble.tumblr.com)
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoyed.


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